Employers shell out $100 billion for employee downtime

1of2A study by the McCombs School of Business found U.S. companies pay more than $100 billion for time spent idle. This call center photo shows busy workers.Photo: Mark Mulligan /Mark Mulligan / Houston Chronicle

2of2A study by the McCombs School of Business found U.S. companies pay more than $100 billion for time spent idle. This photo of a call center in Houston photo shows workers who if not busy answering calls appear to be busy having fun.Photo: Mark Mulligan /Mark Mulligan / Houston Chronicle

U.S. employers are paying more than $100 billion for workers to do nothing, according to a study released Wednesday by the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.

The study, said to be the first measure of the extent of downtime, found that despite widespread conceptions that workers are too busy, 78.1 percent of surveyed employees reported idle time at work, with 21.7 percent of them saying they experienced it on a daily basis.

Of the 1,003 respondents included in the survey results, a worker earning the median U.S. wage of $17.09 an hour was paid $977 a year for either forced or optional idleness. Multiplied out by an estimated 135 million employees working out of their home, the nation’s cost of idle time really adds up.

“The consequences of idle time are costly, and because it’s in the employee’s best interest to appear busy, it’s likely that managers are not aware of the true extent of employee idle time,” said Andrew Brodsky, an assistant professor at McCombs who co-authored the story with Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. “Increased transparency and understanding of the amount of time employees spend idle at work can help managers optimize worker productivity and satisfaction.”

The study found the extent of downtown was consistent across occupations ranging from call center customer service to management to military service and did not vary significantly according to job type, socioeconomic status or education level. And whatever or wherever the workplace, employees use similar tacticsto avoid boredom or appearing idle.

For example, employees tend to “work stretch,” cutting their pace to prolong tasks, or engage in “dead time,” which is slowing down as a task nears completion and is the opposite of the “deadline” tendency of speeding things up.

“You just try and slow down your work so that you’re not just sitting there staring at the ceiling and your boss is seeing you do that,” Brodsky said in an interview.

That’s not to say employers should look at the study as a directive to slash payrolls, he said.

While there are cases where workers make a choice to procrastinate or surf the internet, in a lot of cases employees are forced into inactivity by malfunctioning equipment or inevitable slow periods. For example, a customer service or internal help desk employee may have a lull between calls. Security guards may spend a lot of time standing around. Brodsky referenced the famous saying in the military of “hurry up and wait.”

“Unfortunately, employees often can’t do anything about it,” Brodsky said. “In many cases, it’s just as bad sitting there pretending to be busy as it is being very busy because it’s just not enjoyable. It’s really boring.”

Brodsky does suggest alternatives, such as allowing workers to surf the internet, take breaks or leave early during slow times so that they can focus on the times when work flow peaks.

“When employees expect to be looking at the internet during their idle time they actually work more quickly so that idle time is available,” he said.

Ideally, workplaces would strive for an “optimal level of arousal or stimulation” that’s somewhere between being overworked and underworked, he said.

“If you asked me what the ideal work situation looks like, it’s where there’s this kind of openness on both sides, where employees feel more comfortable kind of saying, ‘Listen, you know I have nothing to do at the moment,’” he said. “But there’s this suboptimal situation where employees are punished for being seen doing nothing … because their intentions are against showing that there’s excess time.”